In a conversation linked to the Yuan-Xiao Festival, a post that appeared on February 17, Alessandro, a European with a degree in East Asian studies living in China with his Chinese wife, wrote a comment that helped me understand something I’d read years ago written by Lin Yutang.

Writing of the “Chinese Mind” on page 81 of the 1938 Holcyon House Edition of My Country and My People, Lin Yutang said, “The Chinese language and grammar … in its form, syntax and vocabulary, reveals an extreme simplicity of thinking, concreteness of imagery and economy of syntactical relationships.”

I didn’t clearly understand what Lin Yutan meant until Alessandro wrote in his recent comment, “The Latin alphabet is a phonetic one, and as such, it simply reproduces the sounds of the spoken language, making it more susceptible of changes whenever the spoken language changes. Chinese Hanzi, on the other hand, conveys almost no “phonetic” information by itself … (and doesn’t change much in its meaning as time passes).”

I talked to my Chinese wife of what Alessandro meant, and she said when she first arrived in the US what she missed most was the lack of books written in mainland Mandarin, which is different than Mandarin in Taiwan.

This explains why she buys so many books in Mandarin each time she/we visit China and brings them home to the US reading sometimes one or two a day until the supply runs dry.

Cultural Competence: Managing Your Prejudices

Alessandro went on to say, “Both Europe and China have had political upheavals and long periods in which they were divided, but (China) having a stable writing system that doesn’t change as much as an alphabetic one helped them not to lose an important element of cultural unity, therefore of “national” identity…

“The Chinese concept of “nation” has nothing to do with the “nation state” concept common in Europe (and North America).

“European nation states are more or less based on ethnicity, while in China it was – and it still somewhat is – based on cultural elements.

“You were Chinese because you shared a common culture, because you acted as a Chinese and assumed Chinese customs.

“Europe never regained the unity (also linguistic) that existed during the Roman Empire, while China always strove to regain unity after each period of division.